


Entry Wounds

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:37:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4128469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s still not used to the idea of bedside manner. Bruce has something of a talent for it, even if it’s only for giving stitches in the arm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entry Wounds

…

The needle is delicate and silent, fine as a strand of spider-silk there in his hand. He holds it in the same way he now holds her forearm, which is with the very tips of his gloved fingers, thumbs rested over the plunger and the pulse in her left wrist, respectively.

“All right,” Bruce says. “What do you prefer – ‘one, two, three, and then go,’ or ‘one, two, and go on three’?”

A suture kit sits open on the table beside them. It is one of the only things left in the cruciform bunker they’ve spent the last few hours clearing, save for a hanging lamp and the two chairs on which they now sit. Gauze sponges, speckled with blood and iodine, have been piled into a stainless steel pan. The laceration itself is thin and red where the knife has sliced through her suit.

And Natasha could likely tell him it doesn’t matter, that she has at one point or another broken almost every bone in that arm he’s currently holding as though it is the stem of a heavy-headed flower.

(Her medical records can testify to all of it: contusions and hematomas, oblique and comminuted and transverse fractures, ballistic trauma and penetrating trauma and the honest, visceral brutality of blunt force trauma for good measure.

_“Note scarring of plantar fascia, general peripheral neuropathy,”_ the typed report also reads, no doubt available in electronic form somewhere on the Internet by now.  _“Indicates prior encounters with bastinado and parilla interrogation methods.”)_

But Natasha cannot tell him any of that, so instead she answers, “Do it on three, then. Three’s a good number.”

“For wishes, maybe.” The needle rests poised against her arm. “Ready?”

Natasha nods.  

And, as promised, he counts down the seconds in a clear, sportive voice: one, two, three.

The anesthesia goes through her arm in one push, filling her skin like raw wool before it hardens and numbs the nerves. Bruce grimaces more than she does while making the injection, while hooking a curved suture needle through one end of the wound to make a first stitch.

“Everything okay so far?” The thread works itself into a tidy forward knot. His wrist turns the needle holders around for a second throw.  “Wiggle your fingers again for me.”

She gives him a thumbs-up sign instead, nerves and muscles in working order. “Okay so far. But hey, worst case scenario, I’ll just get to have a hook for a left hand. Don’t worry.”  

“I’d prefer we avoid that, if possible,” Bruce says. “Tony gets enough material for tasteless pirate jokes from Fury already.”

“Good. Stark can be our talking parrot.”

His lips twitch, but remain firmly pressed into a serious line. “I really don’t think you want me to laugh while I’m doing this, so.  _Chup kora_.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Then he brings the needle down, up again for a second stitch.

She keeps quiet to watch.

Uncertain what to do with her other hand, Natasha settles for resting it atop her knee. Her feet are crossed at the ankles, tucked beneath the chair, like a young girl in a skirt she has been asked not to wrinkle; she is unaccustomed to being this close to him, or at least not this version of him. They had not needed that from him today – and she would rather not disrupt the relieved stillness settled around him now, solid as a magnetic field.

Three stitches, four stiches, the blue vicryl thread a series of tally marks against her skin.

The steel-frame glasses have slid down his nose, but he does not bother pushing them up. His face fixes into a kind of singular, absorbed concentration as he works, head bowed over low enough that she can see a few flecks of silver in his dark hair. He has rolled his sleeves up to the elbow, and tendons in his arm jump out when he turns his wrist to make a stitch, to draw it tight.

The bunker smells sooty and damp, like the inside of a chimney. He smells faintly of aftershave and bar soap.

Six, seven, eight stitches, all straight and even, ties in a rail.

Periodically his eyes will flick up over the glasses to look at her, scanning her face for – what, for pain?  Whether it is the anesthesia, or the fact that he’s making every stitch as carefully as a piece of embroidery work, Natasha can’t feel a thing.

(She has been sedated before, she has been tranquilized before. She has been instructed in the particular details of poisoning symptoms, arsenic and cyanide and perhaps alpha-latrotoxin found in the bite of a  _Latrodectus mactans,_ for times when pain and irony rather than death is your enemy’s object.)

After a ninth, tenth stitch, demarcations of the distance between them, Bruce binds off the thread’s end and speaks again.

“Sorry if that hurt at all.”  He daubs ointment on with two fingers before covering it with a bandage. “I’m, uh, better at taking things apart than putting them back together.”

She’s not sure if this references the degree in nuclear physics, or the other-othered self who varies between destroying and protecting him. Natasha, for her part, has never been able to separate the personal from the professional anyway.  

Either one could work.

“I guess that makes two of us,” she says.

“Really? Remind me who helped put this team together, then.”  He hooks his thumbs into the gloves and pulls them off, rummages through his medical bag, so he cannot see her face when he says this. “Now, here’s the really crucial question – grape, or sour apple?”

Natasha draws the injured arm against her chest. The bandage is clean and starch-white, warm where he has touched it.  

“Do they sell antibiotics as flavored syrup now, or is that supposed to be euphemism for something?”

In response, Bruce straightens up holding two plastic-wrapped lollipops in his hand.  

“Just standard procedure,” he says, flatly. He slides the glasses back into his breast pocket. “I apologize for the limited selection. I used to have watermelon, too, but I think Steve and Thor split the last of those when we were over in Baghdad.”

Natasha looks at him.

There is gray hair at his temples, too, tired and careworn lines in the skin around his mouth and eyes, but these lines all crease up when he smiles at her: patiently, she realizes. 

He is waiting for her to choose.

(She has stood before a mirror and removed her own stitches with tweezers and a pair of scissors, twenty in all where they had opened her and taken what was needed – or not needed, to be exact – and closed her up again.)

Natasha makes a show of wavering back and forth before selecting the green one. She removes the wrapper, hears the hard candy click against her teeth, and holds its bright taste on her tongue for a moment.

“Thank you,” she tells him.

“Well, keep an eye on it for now.” Bruce folds up the suture kit. “I’ll give you something to keep it from scarring when we get back.”

(This is not what she is thanking him for, but Natasha can’t tell him that either. Or not yet, at least. Not yet)

…

_“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” -_ _Rumi_


End file.
